by Susana Aikin
Marion crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m not stupid, I’ve done my research and I know santeros sacrifice chickens in their rituals, and much worse. You’re not going to fool me.”
Julia is about to open her mouth when I squeeze her arm hard, and she only says, “Ouch,” but gets the message.
Delia stares at Marion patiently. “You are misinformed, young lady. Paleros do not perform blood sacrifices. I’m only here to bless this house, with the help of the Holy Spirit. You have nothing to fear.”
“Is that right?” Marion’s voice spills with contempt. “I don’t care who you are, what you do, or what you think you’re doing here. I am an owner of this house and I would like you to stop everything and leave immediately,” she says with forced calm.
Delia stares at her with an unwavering smile. “All right,” she says after a moment, and then turns to a petrified Constantine. “Constant, before we leave, you’re going to have to smuggle out those old hens again! Jeez, they never do make it to the sacrificial altar, do they?”
Constantine sniggers. None of us laugh. Marion stares ferociously at Delia.
“Before we begin packing, let me make sure I have this right.” Delia walks toward the table, while Constantine scrambles to place a chair behind her. Delia gives Constantine the mop and sits down, without taking her eyes off Marion. “So,” she says in a casual tone, “you do not stand for killings?”
Marion blinks. A moment goes by.
“Are you a vegetarian?” Delia asks.
“That’s none of your business,” Marion says.
“Are you?”
“Of course not!”
“Then you stand for killings. Meaning, every time you eat meat, you kill.”
“That’s different. It has nothing to do with this.”
“Doesn’t it? It’s the taking of a life with forceful intention.”
“Yeah, for the intention of survival!”
“So killing for survival is appropriate. What kind of survival? Only physical?”
Marion looks perplexed. “This is total bullshit. I’m not having this conversation. Please leave!” And she turns around, as if to leave herself.
“Where is your fear coming from?” Delia calls after her. “Has anyone been killed in this house before?”
Marion stops in her tracks. She turns around and stares at Delia, her eyes radiating shock and horror. “What did you say?”
“I said, has anybody been killed in this house?” Delia pronounces her words slowly.
I see Marion begin to shudder. I don’t like the turn this conversation is taking. I walk toward her and put my hand on her arm, but Marion shrugs me off. “What have you told this woman?”
Before I can answer, Delia says, “No one has told me anything. I am asking you. Has anybody been killed in this house?”
Marion looks at her as if the orbs of her eyes were going to explode. She opens her lips to say something, but she seems too agitated to talk. She leans on the wall and starts convulsing with repressed sobs. I walk over to her once more, but she holds up one arm to indicate she doesn’t want me near.
“Leave her,” Delia says. “Let’s go back into the house for a few minutes. Let’s give her some space. And dear, please make another pot of coffee.”
We all leave the patio for the kitchen, Julia in the rear, after gathering the rest of her papers from the floor.
In the kitchen, Delia sits in a chair by the altar, and Julia and Constantine sit at her sides. Nobody talks. I set about making more coffee, while I listen for Marion in the patio. After a few minutes, I hear her footsteps move quietly away. But I don’t hear the gate or her car starting up, which means she’s gone somewhere else in the house. When the coffee is ready, I pour it into cups and take it over to the table.
I drink mine standing at the sink. I’m upset with Julia and Delia. I’m conscious of how crazy and melodramatic Marion can be, but isn’t her vulnerability evident? What looks like all fire and poison always ends up boiling down to a small, breakable creature. Doesn’t Julia know this too well? Isn’t it obvious to Delia too?
Delia sips her coffee in silence. Then she says, “How many people have died in this house?”
“Why? Two,” Julia answers.
“Only two?” Delia asks.
“Yes. Mother, a very long time ago. And Marion’s fiancé, also a while ago.”
“Her fiancé?”
Julia casts down her eyes. “He drowned in the pool.”
“I see.” Delia is pensive while she slurps up the rest of her coffee. Constantine raises his eyebrows in a gesture of sympathetic grief.
“Well, all the more important that we do this limpieza,” Delia says. “However, there’s nothing doing without the consent of the eldest daughter of the house. Now that she’s here, if Marion doesn’t give permission, we can’t proceed.” Delia sets down her empty coffee cup, giving Julia and me a hard look. I imagine she’s holding us responsible for Marion not having agreed to all of this beforehand.
Julia sighs. “I know she’s very upset right now. She’s still traumatized by that awful event. But she’s the type who can also be capable of great clarity. I think if Anna talks to her . . .” Julia looks at me across the room with pleading eyes. She’s saying, I know you’re not one hundred percent into this, but please stay with me right now, please, turn Marion around. She doesn’t need to pronounce a word, she’s asked me to do this type of thing countless times.
“I’ll talk to her,” I say. “But if she refuses, we’ll stop everything. Promise?”
Julia nods.
I walk out of the kitchen into the patio, and then around the house to the main entrance. It’s noon and the sun is at its zenith. The raspy song of cicadas comes thick from all corners of the garden. The sun falls hard on the tiled patio and the old chairs. The porch is hot under the wooden rafters overcrowded with ivy. I peep through the large window that looks into the living room, where Delia and Constantine had been working before Marion arrived. The room is silent. Some of the white-cloth-covered furniture has been moved around. In the middle, leaning against the large sofa, is the mop, and the bucket of water at its feet. To the side stands the broom and, on the floor leaning against its straw brush, sits a round, hairy coconut. Jesus!
I move farther to the library, where I also spy through the glass door. Marion’s broad, plum-colored shape lies doubled up on the long sofa facing the empty fireplace. Her long, dark curls speckled with gray streaks cover her face. I know Julia has been making sure that all doors in the house are open, but now, in view of this one’s rusty and deformed metal hinges, I wonder how she’s unbolted it. It screeches horribly as I push it open, its frame grating against the floor.
But Marion doesn’t move.
I walk past the long shelves jammed with books, a disorderly mass in all sizes and colors, the bulk of Father’s prized art-book collection. I sit in the old leather armchair opposite Marion. I know her temper tantrum is mostly over, and that she might listen to me. Marion is a short-distance runner.
“I’m sorry. I should have called you myself to make sure you were okay with all this,” I say.
Marion clears the hair out of her face with one hand. “I know it’s all Julia’s doing. I’m sure you don’t really want this yourself. It’s just that you always go along with her.” There’s a reproachful tone in her voice. Her face is puffy and reddened, her eyes opaque, as if she had been shedding hot, difficult tears. She’s lying on her side, with bare feet and knees pulled up to her big breasts, showing a long cleavage under the plum dress.
Marion used to be slender, with a long graceful body, flawless white skin, and a curling mane of dark brown hair that fell in long ringlets to her waist. Father used to say she was the Pre-Raphaelite beauty among us, the Dante Gabriel Rossetti, while Julia was the Modigliani and I, the Picasso. He used to sit in this very room and bring down art books from the library shelves, his impatient fingers flipping the pages of the oversized volumes, sear
ching for pictures and portraits to authenticate his allegation. When he found the portraits that proved his point, he would say, this is what Marion looks like, and this is like you, and this, you, and we would stare in confusion at the images on the page. In retrospect, I suppose in my case he meant some portrait of Dora Maar, Picasso’s muse and lover. But back then I felt annoyed and hurt with his Picasso comparison, because what I had seen of his paintings of women like Jacqueline Roque and the Demoiselles d’Avignon were figures with stupid looking eyes, double noses, and childish primary colors all over their faces. Julia also complained about the small, blind eyes of the Modigliani women and felt embarrassed by their nudity. But Marion just sat smiling, intoxicated with silent pride, because Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portrait of Proserpine was the most beautiful of all. Then, anyone would have thought that of the three, she was Father’s favorite. But secretly, I always knew better, because Father admired Picasso over other painters, as the greatest artist of his century.
“What have you told this woman? Did you tell her about Fernando?” Marion asks.
“Not until a minute ago,” I say.
“So how come she is picking up on it? How come she’s talking about someone getting killed?”
“Marion . . .”
“Seriously, is she seeing something we don’t know about? She’s a fortune-teller, isn’t she?”
“She is not a fortune-teller. She’s a santera. A priestess from the Santería tradition,” I say.
“And what is Santería?”
“I don’t know much about it,” I say. “Julia explained it’s a Cuban religion, some sort of mixture between African Yoruba religion and Catholic. Apparently, slave populations mixed their gods with Catholic saints in order to hide them from our evil conquistadors and clergy. Their priests and priestesses, the santeros, work with energy and perform limpiezas, symbolic ceremonies to clear obstacles. That’s supposedly what we’re going for here.”
Marion thinks for a moment. “She might be able to find out hidden information about his death.”
“I don’t think that will happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” I say, exasperated, and then add, despite myself, “C’mon, Marion, will you never let go? It’s been so long.”
“Easy for you to say, it didn’t rip your life apart!”
I sigh and brace myself for what’s coming. We’ve had this conversation so many times, I have so often struggled with answers to her questions, I no longer know what to say. It happens periodically that Marion brings it all up again. And I hate revisiting the memory of that night and the physical nausea that wells up in me when I look back on the twisted sequence of events. But Marion is still trapped in this bubble of time, and always manages to pull me back into it. I’ll admit she’s tried to move on with her life. She’s committed to her work as an architect at the city’s Department of Urban Planning, and has become devoted to her weekly yoga practice, without which she couldn’t bear to face life, as she says. She’s also been half-heartedly dating Brian, a banker guy working for the Madrid branch of Lloyds, for the last five years or so; but to be honest, only due to his unrelenting insistence. Marion still lives in the past.
I look at her straight and see once more that image of broken glass behind her dark irises, a cracked surface where the outer world is reflected in split, asymmetrical forms. This is why looking at Marion is painful. Her broken self is always reflected in her eyes. It’s hard to remember her without shattered eyes, at the time when she was all gentle smiles, and her soft gaze felt as cozy as a winter night by the fireplace. Marion, with her long brown hair and pale skin, her small, delicate nose and full lips, used to be considered a prime example of what they call an English rose, and although her basic beauty has survived the ravages of time, her eyes have not. Their smooth hazel surface was probably changed in one single instant, when the image of Fernando floating belly down at the bottom of the pool splintered her soul. She stood there, a single scream ripping endlessly from her throat, while her body struggled to remain upright, as if a fierce wind were blasting her off the ground. It was I who jumped in the water and tried to drag his body to the surface and toward the rail grips on the shallower side, where we might have a chance of hauling him up. I pulled him by the white shirt he had worn open over his smooth, olive chest only hours before. The small crucifix with a gold chain floated around his neck, weightless, glittering in the water. I struggled to avert my eyes from the bloated, pasty face that bobbed along as I tugged at the body, and from the leather shoe that was still on one foot. Dawn had hardly broken, and I was cold under its pale light. I shivered in the water while I held the lifeless mass, and waited for Marion’s unbearable shrieks to finally bring someone to my aid.
I make an effort to shake off these images from my mind. “Marion, I just need to know if you’ll be okay with the work this woman is doing in the house today. We just want to clear the air so we can let go of the house.”
“Do you really believe she can clear away all that has happened?”
For a moment, her question reverberates in my ears, and the idea of the house as a condensed version of all that has taken place inside its walls fills my mind. Are spaces capable of retaining the impact of events within their structures? Can laughter, tears, love, and hatred linger endlessly inside rooms? Like silent echoes on an infinite rebound? I suppress a shudder.
“I don’t know. She might at least help us get some closure,” I say.
“Do you think she’ll find anything? Some new clue we never considered?”
I want to kneel down and put my arms around her, hold her bosom’s warmth against mine to stop it from dissipating, from hemorrhaging away, as it’s been doing for over a decade. But the distance that has ensued between us lately would never allow for my embracing her now. We’re still holding on to the tension that arose between the three of us after our father’s death, when instead of feeling united by grief, we all chose to go separate ways, as if branching off individually would make it easier for us to overcome the past.
“Marion, let’s just do this, it can’t hurt. Meanwhile we can make plans to empty the house for the sale.”
“Do you really want to sell?”
My chest tightens. I look away. No, I don’t want to sell. I couldn’t bear to have this place torn from my life right now; it would feel like being skinned. I’ve only agreed to talk about the possibility to please Julia, but a part of me wants to believe it will never happen. It’s all we have left. Our parents might not be here any longer, but the house still is.
Marion waits on my words.
“In a way I think it would be the best for us all. It would help us move on.” I echo Julia’s words. Why am I always fearful of antagonizing my sisters? I’ve always been wary of any discord among us. Even more so after Father’s passing. We’d had multiple discussions and fallings-out. The topic of the sale of the house had become the main bone of contention. While Marion was against it, Julia kept urging us to put it on the market. I had first sided with Marion because I didn’t want to deal with anything that would bring back memories. I just wanted to live in the present. Immersed in my company and my ultra-workaholic schedule. But there had also been some bad blood between us, after an old will Father had drawn up over ten years ago popped up during probate as the only valid document around. A will in which he designated me as his main heiress, plus the official executor—a will he no doubt thought many times of changing, but never did. I had immediately redistributed equally among the three of us whatever remained of our father’s diminished fortune, including this ruinous house. But my sisters had retained a certain resentment toward me. Another one of Father’s sweet legacies. We’d talked about it openly a number of times, and whereas Julia seemed more disposed to let go of her bitterness, Marion had a harder time parting with her grudge. She was the eldest, and although she didn’t act like it at all, she had felt disrespected after having been officially wiped out of her authority in the f
amily, and in the inheritance process. That was why being addressed by Delia as the eldest daughter of the house grabbed her. It was the first time anyone returned her, even if just symbolically, to her real place in the family.
Marion sits up slowly, wipes off her tears with the tips of her fingers, adjusts her dress over her knees, and takes up one of the couch cushions, hugging it to her breasts.
She looks through the window for a moment. “I’ll admit that something in me has been wanting to chase out the ghosts of this old house.”
I stare at her, surprised.
She releases the pillow. “I’m sick of living in their shadows.”
CHAPTER 5
Down in the kitchen, everyone sits in silence. The altar is still ablaze, and the room feels like an oven. I think about the oleanders that Julia has brought in and arranged in vases, together with cool daisies and lilies, around bottles and coconut shells, and how soon they will wilt under the heat. Delia fans herself slowly with a small black lacquered fan. Constantine and Julia’s faces are beaded with sweat.
“Marion is okay with the cleaning,” I say.
“Is she all right?” asks Julia.
“She’ll be fine.”
“Good!” Delia says, heaving herself out of the chair. “Let’s get on with it then.”
Everyone trickles out of the kitchen, but I linger around for a bit. I look down at my phone sticking out of my handbag on the counter, and see I have a missed call. Marcus! What would he want all the way from Germany on a Saturday like this? I push the phone deep into the bag. I cannot possibly deal with it now. I’m feeling annoyed and morose. I want to be alone. I hadn’t factored in the amount of emotional upheaval that this seemingly harmless limpieza would bring about. Marion’s has already been triggered, but what if Julia’s goes into one of her sensitive states? It could be more than I can handle in one day.
